How to plan production and post properly

Toolbox by Jonny Elwin

How to properly plan your production and post

When planning the technical ins and outs of your film production and post workflow its important to actually have a plan for the whole process before you being. If you just dive in and make it up as you go along you are sure to encounter, at best, a few technical hitches along the way, slowing you down and costing you time and money, or at worst outright catastrophic disaster.

How to plan your workflow

A while back Studio Daily posted a couple of really helpful articles from Nathan Adams of Cinematomic, an LA based ‘creative solutions’ company who have worked on films like The Social Network and TV shows like House of Cards.

If you’re using a new camera, switching to a new editing platform or changing your workflow, you’d better know everything about that element of your production. On a recent pilot for a reality show we had a combination of 28 cameras that we had to manage. Weeks before the production, the DIT and I used a stopwatch to time the media transfers so we knew exactly how many seconds it took to ingest media from each camera. Based on those calculations, we knew we needed 8 laptops ingesting material the whole time. We were also able to calculate the right amount of RAID storage to have on set (shuttling hard drives wasn’t an option), and we knew we needed two LTO-4 tape drives on set archiving the media every 30 minutes. In the end, he walked away from the location with the raw camera media written to two hard drives and LTO-4 tapes. The RAID went straight into editorial with footage logged, transferred, binned and circle takes already marked. read more...